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http://mmqb.si.com/mmqb/2016/03/26/robert-griffin-rg3-cleveland-browns-nfl-new-york-times-concussion
On RG3, Rules and the NFL’s Reaction to Concussion Story
Robert Griffin III is a Brown, and his new coach is ready to get to work. Plus more on recent changes to kickoffs and ejections, Colin Kaepernick’s deadline and the NFL’s angry response to latest New York Times concussion article
by Peter King
Photo: John McDonnell/The Washington Post via Getty Images
Robert Griffin III is heading to Cleveland, which still might use a high draft pick on a quarterback.
Of all the things that surprised me about Robert Griffin III signing with Cleveland, this might have been the topper: New coach Hue Jackson has totally bought into The New Browns Way. The Moneyball thing, the Harvard-educated front office, the experimental methods the moribund Browns are using to try to escape awfulness. While lifetime baseball analytics guy Paul DePodesta has heard sniggering from NFL people about his “chief strategy officer” role with the Browns, lifetime football guy Jackson is, at least for now, a fan.
“I wouldn’t trade our process for any I’ve seen since I’ve been in the NFL,” Jackson said Saturday from Ohio. “I don’t do anything without us all talking things through. They don’t do anything with talking to me. Paul’s input was very valuable in the process of signing Robert. He was good about the psyche of an athlete coming back from injuries or adversity, and about the fact that it’s a people business. We all talk football, football, football, but this is a people business foremost. And all of us in the process here are joined at the hip.”
The Browns have more question marks than 10 teams in the league combined. We’ll have plenty of time to address those, but for now, the signing of the wayward Griffin leads the pack. It’s not a bad idea. The Browns will pay Griffin $6.75 million this year on, basically, a show-me contract, and the team can choose whether to exercise a second year of the deal worth $7.5 million if Griffin’s any good this season. It’s a good risk to take. Griffin is 26 and was a healthy scratch for all of 2015. He ought to have a chip the size of LeBron James on his shoulder, and the starting job will be his to lose.
When Jackson watched Griffin work out recently, the first-year coach was convinced Griffin can make all the throws. When Jackson spent time with Griffin watching tape (with associate head coach Pep Hamilton in there too), and then with Griffin man-to-man, he was convinced Griffin was worth the chance. What, really, did the Browns have to lose? They still can draft a quarterback of the future with the second overall pick (or the 32nd, or the 65th), and if Griffin stumbles, it only costs them one year when the quarterback of the future wasn’t on the roster anyway … and when Colin Kaepernick would have cost a third/fourth-round pick plus $11.2 million in 2016 pay.
Griffin was a pretty easy call.
“When I looked in his eyes,” said Jackson, “I see a young man who’s been kicked around a little bit. When we talked, there was a humility to him. He took ownership of what happened to him, of what he needs to work on to be good. He knows he played a big part in what happened. There are still questions to address and work to be done. He knows. In this league, you don’t always get another chance like this. Here’s one.”
What messed up Griffin, I will always believe, is not the problems he had with coach Mike Shanahan or offensive coordinator Kyle Shanahan in Washington. Wrecking his knee at the end of his rookie year killed him, because it badly stunted his development. Remember: The Washington offense was cobbled together (with the zone read) in 2012, and the Shanahans felt it wasn’t sustainable long-term to expose Griffin to such punishment.
The 2013 offseason and preseason was going to be used to teach Griffin the full Shanahan offense, but because he spent it in a rehabbing sprint to get healthy enough to play by September 2013, he couldn’t spend nearly enough time in the classroom to learn a new way to play. Then new coach Jay Gruden fell in love with Kirk Cousins, and here we are. “That probably played a huge role in what happened with his development,” Jackson said.
A month from today, the Browns will have a chance to draft a quarterback to go head-to-head with Griffin for the next year or two. Jackson was coy when I asked him if the team still could pick a quarterback high, but there’s a good chance he doesn’t know yet what the first or second rounds hold.
“I don’t think signing Robert says anything about what we’ll do in the draft,” Jackson said. “You never know. You can never have enough good players.”
In Cleveland, a few would be nice. You can tell the Browns are optimistic about Griffin, but this franchise was optimistic about Tim Couch and Brady Quinn and Brandon Weeden. And Johnny Manziel. They’ve had 24 starting quarterbacks in the past 18 seasons. So pardon Brownsland for eye-rolling Griffin. “He has to earn the right to be our guy,” Jackson said.
The bar is low.
* * *
Photo: Michael B. Thomas/Getty Images
Colin Kaepernick’s $11.9 million salary for 2016 will be guaranteed on Friday. Will the 49ers move him—or release him—before then?
A spin around NFL news
From Florida to Cleveland to New York to Santa Clara to Alabama, it was a spicy week. Rules changes, a new home for the 2012 Offensive Rookie of the Year, in-defense-of-football chatter at the league meetings, the future of Colin Kaepernick, another story attacking the NFL for misleading concussion data—and the NFL coming out swinging in response—and the death of a player who must not be forgotten.
The news in brief:
• The ejection rule is not popular, but it’s another example of the coaches not making the rules. It’s been clear from the end of the season that Roger Goodell wanted to crack down on chippy and dirty play, and so on Tuesday when the membership didn’t pass a proposal that would eject a player who got two unsportsmanlike-conduct calls in the same game, it wasn’t dead for these meetings. It came up Wednesday morning and passed.
Bengals coach Marvin Lewis joked about Goodell’s influence on the rules process—“I think the commissioner will take things personally if they don’t go through; a lot of it comes directly from him,” Lewis said—but it’s not really a joke. Goodell thought it was bad look for the league for Odell Beckham Jr., and Vontaze Burfict to take gratuitous shots on players and not get ejected, and it was. And the ejection-on-two-unsportsmanlikes rule was seen by the league as another way to ensure bad behavior would result in dismissal from the game.
The problem, of course, is that Beckham and Burfict were flagged for unnecessary roughness on their fouls, not unsportsmanlike conduct, and thus weren’t subject to ejection or even half of what it would take for an ejection per the calls on the field. The league will put another point of emphasis on officials’ plates this year, urging them to have quicker trigger fingers in issuing ejections for flagrant fouls.
But the coaches thought the unsportsmanlike rule would prompt players to bait guys with one unsportsmanlike foul in a game into a second. There’s certainly something to that. Said Seattle’s Pete Carroll: “I don’t think we need more ways to throw guys out of games. It’s such a big decision, and it’s already in the game; the officials can do what they need to do anyway. I don’t know why we need another additional way to do it.”
• The case of Colin Kaepernick. Come Friday, Colin Kaepernick’s $11.9 million salary for 2016 will be guaranteed, which has led to speculation that the 49ers will be motivated to move him before then, or release him. I don’t see either happening—unless the Broncos get serious about dealing something significant for him, say the 61st pick in the April draft. I believe Chip Kelly wouldn’t want to go into training camp with Blaine Gabbert and a highly drafted rookie as his only serious quarterback options in the NFC West, where the Niners are a clear fourth out of four teams right now.
Not to say Kelly absolutely wouldn’t do it. I still think it’s probable that the 49ers would keep Kaepernick, absent a decent offer, through this season. Even if San Francisco takes a quarterback with the seventh overall pick in the draft, the cap number of Kaepernick, Gabbert and the rookie combined would be about $21.4 million—not prohibitive for the most important position on the field. I think Kelly’s telling the truth when he says he’s looking forward to working with Kaepernick and Gabbert. But the problem with saying anything with certainty now is that Kelly hasn’t been exposed to either player on the field yet.
The way the NFL works now, after the 2011 collective bargaining agreement, is that coaches and players cannot work together until April, and so Kelly doesn’t know much of anything other than what he’s heard about Kaepernick, and he’s not going to make any judgments based on what other people think. Kelly wants to be around him, which he’ll get to do beginning next Monday, when rookie coaches are allowed to start working with the players on their roster.
What happens if after four weeks Kelly is sour on Kaepernick? Doubt that happens, but that’s why all you can do here is talk about what is likely—and what is likely is that Kaepernick will be a 49er this year.
Photo: Rick Stewart/Getty Images
Kevin Turner played for the Eagles and Patriots during an eight-year career in the NFL (1992-99).
• Kevin Turner: 1969-2016. On Thursday, former NFL fullback Kevin Turner died at 46 of ALS. Although there have been studies linking degenerative brain diseases such as ALS to football, and it seems likely such diseases can be accelerated by head trauma, and this brain disease and football are likely in lockstep, studies are still being done to prove the link. But I’ve always through the position Turner played, lead blocker on several good running teams in Philadelphia and New England, has to result in more head trauma than most players endure. Fullbacks and veteran special-teamers who have high-impact collisions would be the players most worrisome to me as far as long-term trauma is concerned.
In 2013, I spoke to Turner at length about his fight with ALS, and about the lawsuit in which he was lead plaintiff, the $765 million concussion suit, the settlement of which remains in the hands of the courts. What struck me was his love of football—and the fact that he not only allowed his son to play but encouraged him. “It’s not complicated,” Turner said. “I love football. I always will love football. I love football so much I let my oldest son play the game, because I knew he would love it too.”
Now that Turner is gone, I find myself wondering: How much better off would he have been had his career come 20 years later? I ask that because Turner told me the day we spoke about a game on Sept. 7, 1997, against Green Bay, when he was an Eagle. He suffered a concussion that day, and the difference in the attention paid to concussions then compared to now seems particularly stark.
“We played them in Philly,” Turner told me, in a voice that was already a little scrambled because of the effects ALS had on the muscles that controlled his speech. “I remember the opening kickoff, and then I remember, maybe late in the first quarter, going up to our backup quarterback and saying, ‘You’ll think I’m crazy, but are we in Green Bay or Philly? And how are we doing?’ He went and got a doctor. Turns out I had played a bunch of plays on automatic pilot. The doctor said, ‘Remember these words,’ and I couldn’t. And he gave me the test three or four times, and finally I think it was the fourth time, I remembered the words, and they let me back in the game. You can’t imagine the fit I would have thrown if they wouldn’t have let me back in the game.”
Turner played the rest of the game. He remembers a long drive in the fourth quarter—being the lead blocker for Ricky Watters play after play—that led to the winning touchdown. Nineteen plays, 80 yards, touchdown. Block after block.
“That’s just what you did then,” he said.
He watched film with his teammates the next day, and there was a series of plays he had no idea had happened. He was back at practice Wednesday. He played the next week. Concussion protocol? No such thing.
That wasn’t the only time he played when he shouldn’t have. But he blamed himself as much as he blamed the football culture of the day. “Football didn’t do this to me,” he said. “My ignorance did it. That, and maybe others who should have known better.”
I asked him that day how he could still love the game.
“Now,” Turner said, “you see doctors, trainers and coaches who have the knowledge about concussions and head injuries treating them different than when I played. We should be excited about the game now. It’s the most beloved game in the country, and they’re making it safer now. Now, a guy wobbles back to the sidelines, and it’s likely he’s done for the day. But they’ll examine him now. Refs are looking now. Trainers, doctors are looking. Hopefully, after 10 years, after maybe one more generation of players understands it’s okay to say you have a concussion, players will learn a different game.”
A remarkable man, gone at 46. His death should be another clarion call to be sure no player ever plays with a concussion again.
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The league comes out swinging
Last Thursday, the New York Times wrote a long piece claiming the NFL, using shoddy medical and reporting practices, omitted more than 100 diagnosed concussions from its first purported conclusive gathering of concussion data from teams, between 1996 and 2001. The Times also attempted to link the NFL and the tobacco industry by writing, “… records show a long relationship between two businesses with little in common beyond the health risks associated with their products.”
I’ll get to the main point of this note in a moment—that the NFL’s vitriolic 3,567-word reaction in two long statements, and ads bought on the Timeswebsite attacking the story, denote a sea change in how an embattled league reacts to a critical story. But some background first.
There are some good points made in the Times story. The chairman of the data-gathering committee, Dr. Elliot Pellman of the Jets, called the committee’s research independent and meticulous, though most of the committee members were employed by NFL teams, and this meticulous work certainly missed at least 10 percent of the documented concussions over the six seasons. The paper reported that two concussions suffered by Jets star Wayne Chrebet, on the team of the chairman of the committee, were not included.
The 49ers had zero concussions listed in the study between 1997 and 2000, the paper reported, though quarterback Steve Young suffered two in this period; similarly, concussions suffered by Troy Aikman are also not included in the study. One of the league’s major points of contention was that teams weren’t mandated to participate fully in the study, only strongly encouraged to do so. The Timesquoted a paper saying then-commissioner Paul Tagliabue “mandated” all head injuries should be reported.
The league insisted that if concussions were missed, they were missed out of data-gathering flaws in an era when concussions were not an exact science, and not because the committee purposely tried to hide the injuries.
The MMQB’s Jenny Vrentas has been our reporter covering much of the head-trauma issue since our inception in 2013. As she noted upon examining the Timesstory and the league’s response, “Had this study been more comprehensive and more accurate and potentially less biased if in fact these data omissions were deliberate, the alarm could have been sounded much sooner on the head-injury issue. CTE hadn’t been discovered in football players in the ’90s, but as one researcher I talked to put it, even if we didn’t know it was CTE then, this should have been the warning bell for a relationship between repeated blows to the head and long-term consequences. Instead, the start of critical research was delayed.”
Here’s what I gleaned from the Times story: The NFL’s first attempt at a concussion study was shoddy, which surprises no one. The NFL’s first attempt at a concussion study seemed to not include obvious and well-known concussions, which shouldn’t surprise anyone. There are some anecdotal but not conclusive attempts to link the tobacco and football industries, which don’t work and in my opinion weaken the Times’ story. I also was stunned to see this be the lead story on Page 1 of the Times on Friday.
None of the revelations in the story surprise anyone who saw “Concussion” or read “League of Denial” or has watched the NFL shift the focus from that flawed era of the study of NFL head trauma by starting anew with stronger efforts over the past decade. That’s probably why the reaction in most quarters to this story is not to ignore it because it has no validity, but to ignore it because no one believes the NFL did a good job regarding concussions two decades ago anyway.
The NFL’s reaction was perhaps as angry and pointed and detailed as I’ve seen about a media story in the 32 years I’ve covered the league. It’s new executive vice president of communications and social responsibility, Joe Lockhart, said on Saturday that the Times“used tabloid tactics” and “showed complete disregard” for the truth. Lockhart was the White House press secretary for two years in the Clinton presidency. I asked him how often during his White House job he responded as harshly as he did here.
“You mean, how many times a day?” he said.
“Why did we respond this way? We live in a world of advocacy journalism. Organizations like the NFL have to advocate for themselves. This story was wrong, and deserved a response. One of the things I believe strongly in is that people aren’t broadcast to any more. They discover news.
So you have to tell your story on many platforms. It’s not enough to issue a statement and say it’s not true and then go home for the evening. The information flow now is as much on social platforms, on Twitter, on other areas. We feel very strongly about this, and we want people to understand that.”
Comparing the NFL to Big Tobacco, Lockhart said, “is so breathtakingly irresponsible it would be malpractice for me to sit by and not say so.”
The surprise is, it’s never been handled this way in the past.
I will leave you with one story I heard from the league meetings last week. The league’s chief medical officer, Elizabeth Nabel, addressed the owners about medical issues. She talked about the evolution of understanding heart disease, and the fact that early opinions about how to treat heart disease turned out to be either faulty or wrong, and it took about 50 years before the science of understanding heart disease was conclusive and indisputable.
The clear implication: CTE and head trauma and the long-term effects of concussions could take a while to fully understand. For now, it’s smart to take it all very seriously—but to understand no one has all the answers. The facts should speak. That’s going to take some time to develop.
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Ten Things I Think I Think
1. I think we should start on that Feely Tweet. Let me ask you a question: If you had a kicker who could pop up a kick quite high and deep, and make it fall down around the 8-yard line, and if you had a good kick-coverage team that could clog the running lanes as soon as the returner caught the ball, wouldn’t you think there would be a very good chance you could prevent the returner from getting the ball out to at least the 25-yard line? I would.
Which is why the NFL Competition Committee made a curious stand at the league meetings. Two coaches told me they would strongly consider popping up kicks so their coverage team could smother the returner. Now, bold coach statements in the spring have a way of disappearing when the season starts, so we’ll see. But this rule change makes little sense to me. I think it will encourage higher kickoffs and more of the kind of returns the league was trying to eliminate.
2. I think Bruce Arians is a good man and a colorful, smart coach. But he’s wrong when told me, “People that say ‘I won’t let my son play [football],’ are fools.” I know thoughtful parents who won’t let their sons play football. Some are just not sure about the science, and they figure if they make a mistake and allow children to play tackle it could show up later in life in advanced brain trauma. Some think other sports are fine, just so long as it keeps the children active and playing a team sport. Parents who deny tackle football to their sons are, in most cases, concerned about the health of their kids, and they are absolutely right to be.
3. I think this is not going to be a popular story in many circles, but it needs to be told. It's from Eric Adelson, of Yahoo Sports, about the fact that we don't know everything yet about brain trauma and CTE, and it's better sometimes to say, “I’m not sure,” than to make a categorical statement before all the facts are in. Very good of Adelson to make the point.
4. I think the should-we-sign-Johnny Manziel dilemma was put quite well by an owner who loves him, Jerry Jones of Dallas, but is afraid of his personal demons.Jones told me: “You can be the smartest mathematician, you can be the greatest politician, but if you can’t get it straight with your life, you don’t get those chances. I am more concerned with that, and with that in mind, I’m not thinking about where he is with football and the Cowboys … Will [he] have the discipline and the will to get out there and do it day in and day out and make like Peyton Manning and make a career out of doing it every day? That hasn’t been shown.” Exactly.
5. I think I have a lot of respect for veteran NFL reporter Howard Balzer, who wrote last week that multiple sources told him the Rams drafted openly gay defensive end Michael Sam in 2014 as a part of a deal to avoid being the NFL’s team on “Hard Knocks” that season. But I can’t find any proof that the story is true. A lot of the story seems logical—the NFL needed a team to take Sam as the draft wound down, and coach Jeff Fisher being a friend of the league, it made sense to get the Rams to be that team. But on Friday three people close to this story vehemently denied that a deal happened between the league and Rams. Again, I can’t swear that the story is wrong. I just found no reliable people Friday to tell me it’s correct.
6. I think Twitter feuds between Odell Beckham Jr. and Josh Norman bore me to tears.
7. I think I liked Jenny Vrentas’ interview with Bengals executive VP Katie Blackburn, 50, who is being groomed to run the Bengals when her father, Mike Brown, walks away. (Mike, the son of Bengals founder Paul Brown, has already ceded many areas of control to his daughter.) Blackburn, a college hockey player at Dartmouth, is in her 25th year with the team. I can tell you she’s well-respected by the agents she negotiates with, and by those in the league office.
Blackburn to Vrentas on the future of women in influential NFL roles: “There are a lot more opportunities for women, and I absolutely expect it to continue to grow. There are more opportunities for women to get in today at NFL teams, because there are bigger marketing staffs, there is an IT department, there is data analytics, and obviously there are opportunities also in scouting or even coaching. The more opportunities women have to get in will give them more of an opportunity to grow into other positions.”
8. I think Titans GM Jon Robinson, in a stealth way, is doing the best job he can convincing GMs in the top 10 that he’d absolutely, unequivocally trade the first pick in the draft. And he would. I don’t think he will, at the end of the process. But I do think he’s creating the image that he’s open for business. And what he really needs is the Niners or Rams to fall deeply in love with one of the quarterbacks. That hasn’t changed.
9. I think I believe the Rams will play in China—a regular-season game—in 2018, as was leaked last week. And I think there are 31 other coaches who would find it a nightmare to make that trip … and maybe 20 or so owners who would be intrigued by it. There’s a first-team-in sense about China that intrigues lots of owners, who view their teams as sports franchises/profit centers. Imagine if the foe is Seattle. Imagine how many Chinese might buy Russell Wilson jerseys, or join Seahawks fan groups and spend money on Seahawks stuff. Or Rams stuff. What I’m saying is that on the surface you’d never think teams would want to play in China. But a bunch of owners do. And owners control this league.
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http://mmqb.si.com/mmqb/2016/03/26/robert-griffin-rg3-cleveland-browns-nfl-new-york-times-concussion
On RG3, Rules and the NFL’s Reaction to Concussion Story
Robert Griffin III is a Brown, and his new coach is ready to get to work. Plus more on recent changes to kickoffs and ejections, Colin Kaepernick’s deadline and the NFL’s angry response to latest New York Times concussion article
by Peter King
Photo: John McDonnell/The Washington Post via Getty Images
Robert Griffin III is heading to Cleveland, which still might use a high draft pick on a quarterback.
Of all the things that surprised me about Robert Griffin III signing with Cleveland, this might have been the topper: New coach Hue Jackson has totally bought into The New Browns Way. The Moneyball thing, the Harvard-educated front office, the experimental methods the moribund Browns are using to try to escape awfulness. While lifetime baseball analytics guy Paul DePodesta has heard sniggering from NFL people about his “chief strategy officer” role with the Browns, lifetime football guy Jackson is, at least for now, a fan.
“I wouldn’t trade our process for any I’ve seen since I’ve been in the NFL,” Jackson said Saturday from Ohio. “I don’t do anything without us all talking things through. They don’t do anything with talking to me. Paul’s input was very valuable in the process of signing Robert. He was good about the psyche of an athlete coming back from injuries or adversity, and about the fact that it’s a people business. We all talk football, football, football, but this is a people business foremost. And all of us in the process here are joined at the hip.”
The Browns have more question marks than 10 teams in the league combined. We’ll have plenty of time to address those, but for now, the signing of the wayward Griffin leads the pack. It’s not a bad idea. The Browns will pay Griffin $6.75 million this year on, basically, a show-me contract, and the team can choose whether to exercise a second year of the deal worth $7.5 million if Griffin’s any good this season. It’s a good risk to take. Griffin is 26 and was a healthy scratch for all of 2015. He ought to have a chip the size of LeBron James on his shoulder, and the starting job will be his to lose.
When Jackson watched Griffin work out recently, the first-year coach was convinced Griffin can make all the throws. When Jackson spent time with Griffin watching tape (with associate head coach Pep Hamilton in there too), and then with Griffin man-to-man, he was convinced Griffin was worth the chance. What, really, did the Browns have to lose? They still can draft a quarterback of the future with the second overall pick (or the 32nd, or the 65th), and if Griffin stumbles, it only costs them one year when the quarterback of the future wasn’t on the roster anyway … and when Colin Kaepernick would have cost a third/fourth-round pick plus $11.2 million in 2016 pay.
Griffin was a pretty easy call.
“When I looked in his eyes,” said Jackson, “I see a young man who’s been kicked around a little bit. When we talked, there was a humility to him. He took ownership of what happened to him, of what he needs to work on to be good. He knows he played a big part in what happened. There are still questions to address and work to be done. He knows. In this league, you don’t always get another chance like this. Here’s one.”
What messed up Griffin, I will always believe, is not the problems he had with coach Mike Shanahan or offensive coordinator Kyle Shanahan in Washington. Wrecking his knee at the end of his rookie year killed him, because it badly stunted his development. Remember: The Washington offense was cobbled together (with the zone read) in 2012, and the Shanahans felt it wasn’t sustainable long-term to expose Griffin to such punishment.
The 2013 offseason and preseason was going to be used to teach Griffin the full Shanahan offense, but because he spent it in a rehabbing sprint to get healthy enough to play by September 2013, he couldn’t spend nearly enough time in the classroom to learn a new way to play. Then new coach Jay Gruden fell in love with Kirk Cousins, and here we are. “That probably played a huge role in what happened with his development,” Jackson said.
A month from today, the Browns will have a chance to draft a quarterback to go head-to-head with Griffin for the next year or two. Jackson was coy when I asked him if the team still could pick a quarterback high, but there’s a good chance he doesn’t know yet what the first or second rounds hold.
“I don’t think signing Robert says anything about what we’ll do in the draft,” Jackson said. “You never know. You can never have enough good players.”
In Cleveland, a few would be nice. You can tell the Browns are optimistic about Griffin, but this franchise was optimistic about Tim Couch and Brady Quinn and Brandon Weeden. And Johnny Manziel. They’ve had 24 starting quarterbacks in the past 18 seasons. So pardon Brownsland for eye-rolling Griffin. “He has to earn the right to be our guy,” Jackson said.
The bar is low.
* * *
Photo: Michael B. Thomas/Getty Images
Colin Kaepernick’s $11.9 million salary for 2016 will be guaranteed on Friday. Will the 49ers move him—or release him—before then?
A spin around NFL news
From Florida to Cleveland to New York to Santa Clara to Alabama, it was a spicy week. Rules changes, a new home for the 2012 Offensive Rookie of the Year, in-defense-of-football chatter at the league meetings, the future of Colin Kaepernick, another story attacking the NFL for misleading concussion data—and the NFL coming out swinging in response—and the death of a player who must not be forgotten.
The news in brief:
• The ejection rule is not popular, but it’s another example of the coaches not making the rules. It’s been clear from the end of the season that Roger Goodell wanted to crack down on chippy and dirty play, and so on Tuesday when the membership didn’t pass a proposal that would eject a player who got two unsportsmanlike-conduct calls in the same game, it wasn’t dead for these meetings. It came up Wednesday morning and passed.
Bengals coach Marvin Lewis joked about Goodell’s influence on the rules process—“I think the commissioner will take things personally if they don’t go through; a lot of it comes directly from him,” Lewis said—but it’s not really a joke. Goodell thought it was bad look for the league for Odell Beckham Jr., and Vontaze Burfict to take gratuitous shots on players and not get ejected, and it was. And the ejection-on-two-unsportsmanlikes rule was seen by the league as another way to ensure bad behavior would result in dismissal from the game.
The problem, of course, is that Beckham and Burfict were flagged for unnecessary roughness on their fouls, not unsportsmanlike conduct, and thus weren’t subject to ejection or even half of what it would take for an ejection per the calls on the field. The league will put another point of emphasis on officials’ plates this year, urging them to have quicker trigger fingers in issuing ejections for flagrant fouls.
But the coaches thought the unsportsmanlike rule would prompt players to bait guys with one unsportsmanlike foul in a game into a second. There’s certainly something to that. Said Seattle’s Pete Carroll: “I don’t think we need more ways to throw guys out of games. It’s such a big decision, and it’s already in the game; the officials can do what they need to do anyway. I don’t know why we need another additional way to do it.”
• The case of Colin Kaepernick. Come Friday, Colin Kaepernick’s $11.9 million salary for 2016 will be guaranteed, which has led to speculation that the 49ers will be motivated to move him before then, or release him. I don’t see either happening—unless the Broncos get serious about dealing something significant for him, say the 61st pick in the April draft. I believe Chip Kelly wouldn’t want to go into training camp with Blaine Gabbert and a highly drafted rookie as his only serious quarterback options in the NFC West, where the Niners are a clear fourth out of four teams right now.
Not to say Kelly absolutely wouldn’t do it. I still think it’s probable that the 49ers would keep Kaepernick, absent a decent offer, through this season. Even if San Francisco takes a quarterback with the seventh overall pick in the draft, the cap number of Kaepernick, Gabbert and the rookie combined would be about $21.4 million—not prohibitive for the most important position on the field. I think Kelly’s telling the truth when he says he’s looking forward to working with Kaepernick and Gabbert. But the problem with saying anything with certainty now is that Kelly hasn’t been exposed to either player on the field yet.
The way the NFL works now, after the 2011 collective bargaining agreement, is that coaches and players cannot work together until April, and so Kelly doesn’t know much of anything other than what he’s heard about Kaepernick, and he’s not going to make any judgments based on what other people think. Kelly wants to be around him, which he’ll get to do beginning next Monday, when rookie coaches are allowed to start working with the players on their roster.
What happens if after four weeks Kelly is sour on Kaepernick? Doubt that happens, but that’s why all you can do here is talk about what is likely—and what is likely is that Kaepernick will be a 49er this year.
Photo: Rick Stewart/Getty Images
Kevin Turner played for the Eagles and Patriots during an eight-year career in the NFL (1992-99).
• Kevin Turner: 1969-2016. On Thursday, former NFL fullback Kevin Turner died at 46 of ALS. Although there have been studies linking degenerative brain diseases such as ALS to football, and it seems likely such diseases can be accelerated by head trauma, and this brain disease and football are likely in lockstep, studies are still being done to prove the link. But I’ve always through the position Turner played, lead blocker on several good running teams in Philadelphia and New England, has to result in more head trauma than most players endure. Fullbacks and veteran special-teamers who have high-impact collisions would be the players most worrisome to me as far as long-term trauma is concerned.
In 2013, I spoke to Turner at length about his fight with ALS, and about the lawsuit in which he was lead plaintiff, the $765 million concussion suit, the settlement of which remains in the hands of the courts. What struck me was his love of football—and the fact that he not only allowed his son to play but encouraged him. “It’s not complicated,” Turner said. “I love football. I always will love football. I love football so much I let my oldest son play the game, because I knew he would love it too.”
Now that Turner is gone, I find myself wondering: How much better off would he have been had his career come 20 years later? I ask that because Turner told me the day we spoke about a game on Sept. 7, 1997, against Green Bay, when he was an Eagle. He suffered a concussion that day, and the difference in the attention paid to concussions then compared to now seems particularly stark.
“We played them in Philly,” Turner told me, in a voice that was already a little scrambled because of the effects ALS had on the muscles that controlled his speech. “I remember the opening kickoff, and then I remember, maybe late in the first quarter, going up to our backup quarterback and saying, ‘You’ll think I’m crazy, but are we in Green Bay or Philly? And how are we doing?’ He went and got a doctor. Turns out I had played a bunch of plays on automatic pilot. The doctor said, ‘Remember these words,’ and I couldn’t. And he gave me the test three or four times, and finally I think it was the fourth time, I remembered the words, and they let me back in the game. You can’t imagine the fit I would have thrown if they wouldn’t have let me back in the game.”
Turner played the rest of the game. He remembers a long drive in the fourth quarter—being the lead blocker for Ricky Watters play after play—that led to the winning touchdown. Nineteen plays, 80 yards, touchdown. Block after block.
“That’s just what you did then,” he said.
He watched film with his teammates the next day, and there was a series of plays he had no idea had happened. He was back at practice Wednesday. He played the next week. Concussion protocol? No such thing.
That wasn’t the only time he played when he shouldn’t have. But he blamed himself as much as he blamed the football culture of the day. “Football didn’t do this to me,” he said. “My ignorance did it. That, and maybe others who should have known better.”
I asked him that day how he could still love the game.
“Now,” Turner said, “you see doctors, trainers and coaches who have the knowledge about concussions and head injuries treating them different than when I played. We should be excited about the game now. It’s the most beloved game in the country, and they’re making it safer now. Now, a guy wobbles back to the sidelines, and it’s likely he’s done for the day. But they’ll examine him now. Refs are looking now. Trainers, doctors are looking. Hopefully, after 10 years, after maybe one more generation of players understands it’s okay to say you have a concussion, players will learn a different game.”
A remarkable man, gone at 46. His death should be another clarion call to be sure no player ever plays with a concussion again.
* * *
The league comes out swinging
Last Thursday, the New York Times wrote a long piece claiming the NFL, using shoddy medical and reporting practices, omitted more than 100 diagnosed concussions from its first purported conclusive gathering of concussion data from teams, between 1996 and 2001. The Times also attempted to link the NFL and the tobacco industry by writing, “… records show a long relationship between two businesses with little in common beyond the health risks associated with their products.”
I’ll get to the main point of this note in a moment—that the NFL’s vitriolic 3,567-word reaction in two long statements, and ads bought on the Timeswebsite attacking the story, denote a sea change in how an embattled league reacts to a critical story. But some background first.
There are some good points made in the Times story. The chairman of the data-gathering committee, Dr. Elliot Pellman of the Jets, called the committee’s research independent and meticulous, though most of the committee members were employed by NFL teams, and this meticulous work certainly missed at least 10 percent of the documented concussions over the six seasons. The paper reported that two concussions suffered by Jets star Wayne Chrebet, on the team of the chairman of the committee, were not included.
The 49ers had zero concussions listed in the study between 1997 and 2000, the paper reported, though quarterback Steve Young suffered two in this period; similarly, concussions suffered by Troy Aikman are also not included in the study. One of the league’s major points of contention was that teams weren’t mandated to participate fully in the study, only strongly encouraged to do so. The Timesquoted a paper saying then-commissioner Paul Tagliabue “mandated” all head injuries should be reported.
The league insisted that if concussions were missed, they were missed out of data-gathering flaws in an era when concussions were not an exact science, and not because the committee purposely tried to hide the injuries.
The MMQB’s Jenny Vrentas has been our reporter covering much of the head-trauma issue since our inception in 2013. As she noted upon examining the Timesstory and the league’s response, “Had this study been more comprehensive and more accurate and potentially less biased if in fact these data omissions were deliberate, the alarm could have been sounded much sooner on the head-injury issue. CTE hadn’t been discovered in football players in the ’90s, but as one researcher I talked to put it, even if we didn’t know it was CTE then, this should have been the warning bell for a relationship between repeated blows to the head and long-term consequences. Instead, the start of critical research was delayed.”
Here’s what I gleaned from the Times story: The NFL’s first attempt at a concussion study was shoddy, which surprises no one. The NFL’s first attempt at a concussion study seemed to not include obvious and well-known concussions, which shouldn’t surprise anyone. There are some anecdotal but not conclusive attempts to link the tobacco and football industries, which don’t work and in my opinion weaken the Times’ story. I also was stunned to see this be the lead story on Page 1 of the Times on Friday.
None of the revelations in the story surprise anyone who saw “Concussion” or read “League of Denial” or has watched the NFL shift the focus from that flawed era of the study of NFL head trauma by starting anew with stronger efforts over the past decade. That’s probably why the reaction in most quarters to this story is not to ignore it because it has no validity, but to ignore it because no one believes the NFL did a good job regarding concussions two decades ago anyway.
The NFL’s reaction was perhaps as angry and pointed and detailed as I’ve seen about a media story in the 32 years I’ve covered the league. It’s new executive vice president of communications and social responsibility, Joe Lockhart, said on Saturday that the Times“used tabloid tactics” and “showed complete disregard” for the truth. Lockhart was the White House press secretary for two years in the Clinton presidency. I asked him how often during his White House job he responded as harshly as he did here.
“You mean, how many times a day?” he said.
“Why did we respond this way? We live in a world of advocacy journalism. Organizations like the NFL have to advocate for themselves. This story was wrong, and deserved a response. One of the things I believe strongly in is that people aren’t broadcast to any more. They discover news.
So you have to tell your story on many platforms. It’s not enough to issue a statement and say it’s not true and then go home for the evening. The information flow now is as much on social platforms, on Twitter, on other areas. We feel very strongly about this, and we want people to understand that.”
Comparing the NFL to Big Tobacco, Lockhart said, “is so breathtakingly irresponsible it would be malpractice for me to sit by and not say so.”
The surprise is, it’s never been handled this way in the past.
I will leave you with one story I heard from the league meetings last week. The league’s chief medical officer, Elizabeth Nabel, addressed the owners about medical issues. She talked about the evolution of understanding heart disease, and the fact that early opinions about how to treat heart disease turned out to be either faulty or wrong, and it took about 50 years before the science of understanding heart disease was conclusive and indisputable.
The clear implication: CTE and head trauma and the long-term effects of concussions could take a while to fully understand. For now, it’s smart to take it all very seriously—but to understand no one has all the answers. The facts should speak. That’s going to take some time to develop.
* * *
Ten Things I Think I Think
1. I think we should start on that Feely Tweet. Let me ask you a question: If you had a kicker who could pop up a kick quite high and deep, and make it fall down around the 8-yard line, and if you had a good kick-coverage team that could clog the running lanes as soon as the returner caught the ball, wouldn’t you think there would be a very good chance you could prevent the returner from getting the ball out to at least the 25-yard line? I would.
Which is why the NFL Competition Committee made a curious stand at the league meetings. Two coaches told me they would strongly consider popping up kicks so their coverage team could smother the returner. Now, bold coach statements in the spring have a way of disappearing when the season starts, so we’ll see. But this rule change makes little sense to me. I think it will encourage higher kickoffs and more of the kind of returns the league was trying to eliminate.
2. I think Bruce Arians is a good man and a colorful, smart coach. But he’s wrong when told me, “People that say ‘I won’t let my son play [football],’ are fools.” I know thoughtful parents who won’t let their sons play football. Some are just not sure about the science, and they figure if they make a mistake and allow children to play tackle it could show up later in life in advanced brain trauma. Some think other sports are fine, just so long as it keeps the children active and playing a team sport. Parents who deny tackle football to their sons are, in most cases, concerned about the health of their kids, and they are absolutely right to be.
3. I think this is not going to be a popular story in many circles, but it needs to be told. It's from Eric Adelson, of Yahoo Sports, about the fact that we don't know everything yet about brain trauma and CTE, and it's better sometimes to say, “I’m not sure,” than to make a categorical statement before all the facts are in. Very good of Adelson to make the point.
4. I think the should-we-sign-Johnny Manziel dilemma was put quite well by an owner who loves him, Jerry Jones of Dallas, but is afraid of his personal demons.Jones told me: “You can be the smartest mathematician, you can be the greatest politician, but if you can’t get it straight with your life, you don’t get those chances. I am more concerned with that, and with that in mind, I’m not thinking about where he is with football and the Cowboys … Will [he] have the discipline and the will to get out there and do it day in and day out and make like Peyton Manning and make a career out of doing it every day? That hasn’t been shown.” Exactly.
5. I think I have a lot of respect for veteran NFL reporter Howard Balzer, who wrote last week that multiple sources told him the Rams drafted openly gay defensive end Michael Sam in 2014 as a part of a deal to avoid being the NFL’s team on “Hard Knocks” that season. But I can’t find any proof that the story is true. A lot of the story seems logical—the NFL needed a team to take Sam as the draft wound down, and coach Jeff Fisher being a friend of the league, it made sense to get the Rams to be that team. But on Friday three people close to this story vehemently denied that a deal happened between the league and Rams. Again, I can’t swear that the story is wrong. I just found no reliable people Friday to tell me it’s correct.
6. I think Twitter feuds between Odell Beckham Jr. and Josh Norman bore me to tears.
7. I think I liked Jenny Vrentas’ interview with Bengals executive VP Katie Blackburn, 50, who is being groomed to run the Bengals when her father, Mike Brown, walks away. (Mike, the son of Bengals founder Paul Brown, has already ceded many areas of control to his daughter.) Blackburn, a college hockey player at Dartmouth, is in her 25th year with the team. I can tell you she’s well-respected by the agents she negotiates with, and by those in the league office.
Blackburn to Vrentas on the future of women in influential NFL roles: “There are a lot more opportunities for women, and I absolutely expect it to continue to grow. There are more opportunities for women to get in today at NFL teams, because there are bigger marketing staffs, there is an IT department, there is data analytics, and obviously there are opportunities also in scouting or even coaching. The more opportunities women have to get in will give them more of an opportunity to grow into other positions.”
8. I think Titans GM Jon Robinson, in a stealth way, is doing the best job he can convincing GMs in the top 10 that he’d absolutely, unequivocally trade the first pick in the draft. And he would. I don’t think he will, at the end of the process. But I do think he’s creating the image that he’s open for business. And what he really needs is the Niners or Rams to fall deeply in love with one of the quarterbacks. That hasn’t changed.
9. I think I believe the Rams will play in China—a regular-season game—in 2018, as was leaked last week. And I think there are 31 other coaches who would find it a nightmare to make that trip … and maybe 20 or so owners who would be intrigued by it. There’s a first-team-in sense about China that intrigues lots of owners, who view their teams as sports franchises/profit centers. Imagine if the foe is Seattle. Imagine how many Chinese might buy Russell Wilson jerseys, or join Seahawks fan groups and spend money on Seahawks stuff. Or Rams stuff. What I’m saying is that on the surface you’d never think teams would want to play in China. But a bunch of owners do. And owners control this league.
